Iftikhar Dadi and Elizabeth Dadi live and work in Ithaca, NY.
Iftikhar Dadi and Elizabeth Dadi’s practice investigates the salience of popular media in the construction of memory, borders, and identity in contemporary globalization, and the potential of creative resilience in urban informalities.
Especially developed for LB01, Roz o shab (day and night) is a site-specific neon installation that responds to historical references and sensory encounters of this arresting space. The entangled “river” of blue neon is threaded through with red, rewarding the eye tracing the maze with the one successful route bridging the everyday outside and the liminal inside. Roz o shab’s layout recalls labyrinthine structures in Mughal architecture (bhool bhulaiyan) and analogous fort and palace architectures in other sites. By situating a children’s puzzle with its knotted form in stark juxtaposition with the stateliness of Mughal architecture, Roz o shab evokes the temporal distance that separates the Mughal past from our contemporary present.
Iftikhar and Elizabeth Dadi’s work is frequently realized in large-scale installations and has been exhibited and published internationally, including at the Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil; Asia-Pacific Triennial, Brisbane, Australia; Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial, Fukuoka, Japan; Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, UK; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Kunstmeuseum Wolfsburg, Germany; Miami Art Museum; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Art Gallery of Windsor, Canada; Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh; Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Oslo; and Lahore Biennale.